Char gently wraps the ice pack around Peggy’s puffy pink knuckles, and kisses her on the cheek.

“Proud of you, Big Mama.”

“Big Mama?” I smirk.

“Crow, you suck at this psychic thing.” Char nudges Peggy’s frame with her swaying hip. “C’mon, just tell her already.”

My eyes flicker in and out of focus for a second, and nobody needs to tell me anything. The truth is written all over the air in the room, in sweeping strokes of deep, pure purple and ribbons of milky white that flow effortlessly between Char and Peggy, and wrap lovingly around Daktari’s body as he nuzzles into his mother’s chest.

“Holy shit, Peggy. Char is yours.”

8 DOWN AROUND THE ROOTS

It’s late, but Peggy puts the kettle on, and adds another tea bag to the remnants of the day’s brew before she settles at the table to tell us the story. Six months after my mother nearly hemorrhaged to death in a hospital giving birth to me, Peggy gave quiet, uneventful birth to a baby girl, on a cot in a sparse room at the Home of the Guardian Angel on the Mainland. Four months later, when the baby weight was gone, and she’d stayed to see a few fellow unwed teenage trollops through their own entrance to and exit from motherhood, Peggy returned to Cape Breton, a heavy burden lifted from her belly, her conscience, and her family. Instead, she carried the weight of a slew of fictions about having “gone to an Aunt’s.”

Four years after Peggy’s child was born, Freddy and Dar MacIsaac adopted a little spitfire of a girl from the Mainland. The kid with the wild red hair, snaggled teeth, and blazing eyes had already exhausted a few foster homes. She’d super glued fifteen caterpillars to a cat, and then the cat to a tricycle. Ended up with a forked tongue after sticking it in an electrical outlet. Smashed one car into the side of a house and another into the woods. The child was a well-documented, rip-roaring terror. But from the moment Peggy saw her friend Dar’s new daughter, she could smell it. The smell of blood. Which smells like pine sap, according to Peg. So Charlotte MacIsaac is a bona fide cursed Fortune lunatic criminal, too.

Her eyes are wide and her smile is wild as Peggy tells the story. “Makes sense now, don’t it? Cuss-int!” she croons, snake dancing around the room, sleeping baby in her arms.

“Yous are some messed,” Willy says. “And God, I loves yas all for it.”

“Shut up.” I pinch his leg with my toes under the table. “You only love me for my money.”

That was the other shocker of the day. While Peg and Char were out pucking the piss out of drunk Duke the Puke behind the rink, and Willy and I were playing happy family pretendsies with baby Daktari, Jacinta the lawyer from down the road called me, looking to deliver a copy of Mama’s will. Mama had a life insurance policy. Mama died in an accident. Mama’s will says I’m getting the fifty thousand dollars from her accidental death benefit. I didn’t need to think too hard about my first order of business.